piper827
June 23rd, 2013, 02:39 PM
So I know some people all have their own idea about what the perfect setup for them is. And sometimes that revolves around dual, or even more, booting. For me, it means booting into my Linux Distro of choice (right now Ubuntu) and also Windows 7. Honestly, I rarely ever boot into Windows anymore, except for games (which might change if Steam can start pushing some major titles). But for now it's easier to just play in Windows. My rig consists of a UEFI motherboard (ASRock Z77 pro 4m) a 120gb SSD (Sandisk Extreme) and a 1tb HDD (Seagate) along with a WD 750gb external My Passport. My goal initially was to have Windows 7 and Ubuntu partitioned on the SSD and then all data/games stored on the HDD. But then I realized that the space on the SSD would be better off just straight running Ubuntu, and not Windows at all because I only boot into Windows every other day to play video games. All the major programs and "power user" functionality is being done in Linux, so I'd rather just give all that space to Ubuntu. I would also be able to shrink the SSD and get to mess around again with Arch and other Linux Distros. Here's what I did. I backed up all my important data to the WD external. Then I formatted the HDD and installed Windows 7 on it. The Windows installer recognized the HDD as Disk 0 and the SDD as disk 1. I think this has to do with where the SATA cables are plugged into the motherboard, but I'm not sure. I left Windows alone after a successful initial boot and popped in the Ubuntu 13.04 disk. I went straight to "Install Ubuntu" rather than "Try Ubuntu". Then, when prompted I selected "Something Else" From here Ubuntu recognized the HDD as "sdb" free space (although I know Windows is installed here because when I boot into Windows it shows C:/ having ~940gb free space). So I made sure not to touch that. I also noticed that the SDD was "sda", but had a partition on it for Windows loader. This seems perfect to me, because now all loaders would be starting from the same disk. I left that partition alone and then set up the following accompanying partitions. 300mb for boot, 20gb for root, and 4gb for swap. I left home undefined as I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with that yet. I probably will have a lot of my pictures/videos etc. on the WD for portability and such. I finished the install and rebooted. It brought me straight into GRUB where I could choose the various boot loaders. I selected Windows, to make sure it would still work, and I am actually posting this immediately afterwards, within internet explorer. This is the first time I've used this program since IE5. Oh the memories. Any how, I hope this helps, encourages people when it comes to dual booting. Sometimes it's easier than it seems, depending on what exactly you want to do. I believe side-by-side booting would be a little more difficult. The one step I would think to add would be to setup windows as its own partition on the drive so that it doesn't get recognized as "free space". You could try shrinking the disk volume down before you go to install Ubuntu. Perhaps live booting gparted could help with the setup aswell. Cheers!